Seagate this week unveiled its new Cheetah 15K.5 (PDF), the world's fastest hard drive. The new drive is a 300GB beast, which at first doesn't seem like very impressive in terms of specifications. However, this drive spins at a blistering 15,000 RPM and at that speed, no other line of hard drive is faster.

How Seagate achieves the Cheetah's fast rotation speeds is by using platters that are actually smaller than those in standard desktop hard drives. The drives are physically similar, at 3.5-inches like most desktop hard drives, but inside the platters are small, allowing the fluid-bearing motor to whip those discs around at record speeds. The problem in the past with this is that Cheetah drives have been quite limited in size. You could use them for speed-focused applications and scenarios, but if you wanted space, you were out of luck unless more drives were purchased -- and these drives don't come cheap.

With the new Cheetah 15K.5, Seagate has moved the Cheetah family to perpendicular recording for the first time. This allows Seagate to pack more bits in less area, achieving greater capacities. The new line comes in 73GB, 146GB and 300GB capacities. The following are some of the Cheetah 15K.5's specifications:

Seagate's Cheetah family of drives is also known to have very high reliability ratings. Seagate usually labels them as having over 1.5 million hours of solid operation before failure, or MTBF (mean time before failure).

In related Seagate news, the company finished its acquisition of long-time competitor Maxtor, and in fact plans to lay-off as much as 90% of all Maxtor employees. The news caused a major stir and many are concerned about the future of employment for Americans. The company this week also unveiled full-time/full-disc encryption technology for its notebook drives, providing greater security for traveling users.

"We shipped it on Saturday. Then on Sunday, we rested." -- Steve Jobs on the iPad launch